Worker’s Council

1919-1938

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1919

The Open Communist Party—The Task of the Hour. Unsigned appeal by The Workers' Council. [Oct. 15, 1921] While there was stiff opposition to liquidation of the underground party inside the unified CPA itself, there was a countervailing tendency standing outside of the ranks of the party pushing in exactly the opposite direction—for the elimination of the underground apparatus and for commitment to a fully legalized communist movement. This tendency’s organizational expression was “The Workers’ Council”—formerly the “Committee for the Third International of the Socialist Party,” which departed that organization after the June 1921 Detroit Convention of the SPA. This appeal of the Workers’ Council states that the “infantile radicalism” of the newborn communist movement was contemptuous of mass movements and “called for small, intensely class-conscious organizations that should take upon themselves the leadership in the approaching struggle against world capitalism.” This perspective had been denounced by Lenin and was refuted by the Comintern at its recently concluded Third Congress. Instead, the Comintern now called for participation in the actually existing conservative unions and “openly condemns the agitation for armed insurrection and open rebellion in countries where the revolution is still in the distant future and insists that the communist movement, in every country, must proceed at once to the creation of an open, aboveboard mass movement.” The secret movement had been intellectually stultifying for the American party, the Workers’ Council declared, and its secrets were no secret to authorities, who had inevitably made use of espionage to penetrate the underground organization. The underground form had become an end in itself. It was a form unable to adapt to crisis and dominated by a handful of romanticist underground leaders. Instead, the Workers’ Council called for an open organization, a form able to do effective work. “There could be no better time. Raise your voices, Comrades. Come out of your cellars into the open. Go to your brothers in the mills, the mines, and the factories, and talk to them openly, fearlessly.”

1921

The Open Communist Party—The Task of the Hour. Unsigned appeal by The Workers' Council. [Oct. 15, 1921] While there was stiff opposition to liquidation of the underground party inside the unified CPA itself, there was a countervailing tendency standing outside of the ranks of the party pushing in exactly the opposite direction—for the elimination of the underground apparatus and for commitment to a fully legalized communist movement. This tendency’s organizational expression was “The Workers’ Council”—formerly the “Committee for the Third International of the Socialist Party,” which departed that organization after the June 1921 Detroit Convention of the SPA. This appeal of the Workers’ Council states that the “infantile radicalism” of the newborn communist movement was contemptuous of mass movements and “called for small, intensely class-conscious organizations that should take upon themselves the leadership in the approaching struggle against world capitalism.” This perspective had been denounced by Lenin and was refuted by the Comintern at its recently concluded Third Congress. Instead, the Comintern now called for participation in the actually existing conservative unions and “openly condemns the agitation for armed insurrection and open rebellion in countries where the revolution is still in the distant future and insists that the communist movement, in every country, must proceed at once to the creation of an open, aboveboard mass movement.” The secret movement had been intellectually stultifying for the American party, the Workers’ Council declared, and its secrets were no secret to authorities, who had inevitably made use of espionage to penetrate the underground organization. The underground form had become an end in itself. It was a form unable to adapt to crisis and dominated by a handful of romanticist underground leaders. Instead, the Workers’ Council called for an open organization, a form able to do effective work. “There could be no better time. Raise your voices, Comrades. Come out of your cellars into the open. Go to your brothers in the mills, the mines, and the factories, and talk to them openly, fearlessly.”